（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）教师课堂提问之语用研究.pdf

ii 摘 要 教师话语之课堂提问是教师在教学中经常使用的教学技巧之一，也是影响课堂 交际的一个重要因素。提问话语研究成果丰富，但从语用角度进行的研究较少，仅 为定性研究。 本论文通过对教师课堂提问话语量、提问方式、提问策略和学生反馈等方面的 研究，结合交际理论，从语用学角度，通过“言语行为理论”和“礼貌理论”这两 个解释机制，对武汉大学、华中科技大学，武汉理工大学和华中师范大学一百二十 位大学英语教师问卷调查、十位教师访谈记录和对八位教师进行课堂观察之所得进 行定量定性分析，结果发现教师提问实质是一种言语行为，有着很强的语用目的， 语用目的的不同制约着诸类问题的使用频率。教师提问影响师生课堂交际。本研究 对教师提问语进行语用目的分类和使用频率分析，在此基础上，进一步分析语用目 的实现手段-教师提问的语式特征； 分析语用推理过程和语用策略之一-礼貌策略， 最终找出能够促进课堂双向交际的提问类型。 本研究致力于帮助教师运用提问来达到语用目的从而使学生受益最终促进课堂 交际；提供新的视角来认识教师课堂提问话语, 为教师课堂提问的研究提供更加宽 广的解释维度。 关键词关键词：教师课堂提问 交际理论 言语行为理论 礼貌理论 i abstract teacher questioning, one of the most frequently employed teaching techniques, is different from the routine questioning utilized to seek information. teacher questioning, as a speech act, aims to achieve pragmatic purposes. both domestic and international scholars have dedicated greatly to enormous explorations on teacher questioning. however, all the relevant researches do not go into depth merely providing some qualitative explanation; they lack systematic data and quantitative analysis on teacher questioning, along with the specific suggestions on how to make full use of questions in teaching and thus fulfill pragmatic functions and promote classroom communication. this thesis, to compensate for the inadequacy of previous researches, exerts to investigate question types employed by teachers and pragmatic purposes teachers want to accomplish when adopting questions by analyzing the questionnaires delivered to teachers from huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan university, huazhong normal university and wuhan university of technology and explaining results obtained from classroom observation and interview. for the development of this thesis, the theoretical basis is founded on three major theories: communication theory, speech act theory and politeness theory. the results manifest that teacher questioning, as a speech act, entails various pragmatic purposes, which constraint the amount of questioning. teacher questioning influences teacher-student classroom communication. this study classifies teacher questioning based upon pragmatic purposes and make an analysis on frequency of use; on syntactic features of teacher questioning; pragmatic inferring process; one of the pragmatic strategies-politeness and lastly presents questions that help to promote classroom communication. these results will shed light upon the exploitation of questions in teaching and provide a new perspective- pragmatic research perspective to describe and explain teacher questioning. key words: teacher questioning communication theory speech act theory politeness theory 独创性声明独创性声明 本人声明所呈交的学位论文是我个人在导师指导下进行的研究工作及取得的研 究成果。尽我所知，除文中已经标明引用的内容外，本论文不包含任何其他个人或 集体已经发表或撰写过的研究成果。对本文的研究做出贡献的个人和集体，均已在 文中以明确方式标明。本人完全意识到，本声明的法律结果由本人承担。 学位论文作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规定，即：学校有权 保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版，允许论文被查阅和借阅。 本人授权华中科技大学可以将本学位论文的全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行检 索，可以采用影印、缩印或扫描等复制手段保存和汇编本学位论文。 保密 ，在_ _年解密后适用本授权书。 不保密。 （请在以上方框内打“” ） 学位论文作者签名： 指导教师签名 日期： 2004 年 4 月 27 日 日期： 2004 年 4 月 29 日 本论文属于 1 introduction questioning is one of the most frequently employed teaching techniques according to gall (1970) adopted by teachers in teaching period to stimulate thinking, assess student progress, check on clarity, motivate students to be attentive, maintain classroom order, provide repetition, emphasize key points, and to do many other things. questioning, being interpreted as question-asking behavior in class (gall, 1984), which has played a significant role in teaching process, has attracted much attention in recent years. researchers focus upon teacher questioning is related to their interest in teacher talk. teacher talk, in its narrow sense, refers to language teachers adopt in class, which has been regarded as influential in teaching. teacher questioning, in effect, is an inseparable component of teacher talk. as a result, the research involving teacher questioning, more often than not, is linked with the study of teacher talk. the research concerning teacher questioning conducted by previous researchers deals with the following aspects: the art of teacher questioning, the characteristics of teacher questioning, classification of teacher questioning (barns, 1969), the research involving second language teaching or learning (nunan, 1991) and pragmatic study on teacher talk. to sum up, previous researchers mostly studied teacher questioning from the pedagogical aspects. pragmatic study on teacher questioning is seldom touched upon. some scholars at home and abroad have made pragmatic research on teacher questioning (xiao 2003, tang 2003, li 2003, wang 2003, john heritage 2002, robert piazza 2002). xiao (2003) and tang (2003) made pragmatic study on teacher talk. exactly speaking, xiao ascribed teacher talk via relevance theory, while tang described functions of teacher questioning. john (2001) studied the pragmatic function of interrogative questions, arguing that interrogative questions as a matter of fact being opinions representative and meaning declarative are not real questions seeking information. robert piazza (2002) studied 2 conducive questions. it is noted that conducive questions are ones orienting on hearers concepts and ideas, not for information seeking. the concepts and ideas depend upon hearers comprehension upon conducive questions. the illocutionary act is students acceptance of information teachers expect students to grasp. the function of conducive questions is similar to that of closed questions (questions that hold unique answers.) with their efforts, a new way has been carved out, which interprets teacher talk and teacher questioning in terms of function and pragmatic intention. however, all the relevant researches do not go into depth merely providing some qualitative explanation; they lack systematic data and quantitative analysis on teacher questioning, along with the specific suggestions on how to make full use of questions in teaching and thus fulfill pragmatic functions and promote classroom communication. many aspects need probing in detail. what purposes do teachers want to achieve when employing questions in the classroom? do they hold the same view on the function of questions of various types? do they have similar preference for question types? how are pragmatic purposes inferred by students? what is the process of inferring? how can teachers be confirmed that students are capable of knowing the implicature of questions? is pragmatic inference relevant to context of classroom? does politeness exist in class? do students have face want in class? can questions employed by teachers in class threaten students face? what strategies or questions will be used by teachers to reduce ftas (face threatening acts) in class if students do have face wants? these questions involving pragmatic study remain unanswered. detailed pragmatic study and qualitative study on teacher questioning have not been conducted on a large scale. as a matter of fact, teacher questioning is quite different from daily questioning aiming to seek information. the purpose is not merely information-seeking, but to achieve pragmatic purposes or fulfill pragmatic functions. for instance, phatic questions “who is on duty today?” “is everybody here?” “do you feel cold today?” these questions seem to seek information, however, questions of this type is procedural questions with the purpose 3 of manifesting the beginning of lecture and getting students ready to attend a lecture, which is the real pragmatic function teachers would like to fulfill. teacher questioning is, in effect, a speech act with pragmatic characteristics. to compensate for the deficiency of previous researches, the present study, being a qualitative and quantitative one, aims to analyze from the pragmatic perspective teacher questioning via classroom observation, questionnaire investigation and interviews and based on communication theory, speech act theory and politeness theory, explain how speakers perform speech acts according to certain rules and find out whether their pragmatic purposes are comprehended; find out strategies and question types employed by teachers to achieve politeness. it is to be expected that teachers will make full use of questions to achieve pragmatic purposes and achieve successful classroom communication between teachers and students. classroom observation is made to find out sample questions, question types employed by teachers and its respective pragmatic purposes, questioning features and markers, question types used to achieve politeness, politeness strategies that help to achieve politeness, questions that prevent politeness fulfillment, questions and strategies that promote classroom communication. the questionnaire investigation aims to find out amount of teacher questioning concerning different types of questions, categories of teacher questioning and its pragmatic functions, illocutionary acts of teacher questioning. the interview attempts to discover something that is not covered by classroom observation and questionnaire investigation. in addition, it is expected that the interview is conducted to find out whether its result is in accordance with that of classroom observation and questionnaire investigation or not. this study is of some value, for it will offer a new perspective for the research of teacher talk and a different way to explain teacher questioning. teacher talk can be viewed and described from the pragmatic perspective. this research demonstrates that it is 4 instructive and possible to study teacher talk from the perspective of pragmatics. exactly speaking, the study presents more detailed analysis on teacher questioning compared with previous currently held explanations on teacher questioning, manifesting teacher questioning is a speech act employed in class to accomplish various pragmatic purposes- politeness in particular. the present thesis consists of five chapters. it starts with a brief introduction, offering a general view and research on teacher questioning and indicating gap between the study and previous studies. chapter two presents a specific review to the theories and previous researches relevant to teacher questioning. chapter three introduces the research methodologies, which derive figures and tables by analyzing the data from classroom observation, questionnaire investigation and interview. the fourth chapter, being the core of this thesis, contains the results of tables and figures and significant findings obtained from the results. finally, chapter five brings a conclusion to this thesis, generalizes implications of this study and makes suggestions on how to make full use of questions to accomplish pragmatic purposes thus to facilitate classroom communication. 5 1 literature review as mentioned in the introduction, the development of this thesis is founded on three major theories: communication theory, speech act theory and politeness theory. this chapter sets a theoretical basis for the present study. it begins with three theories concerned mentioned above, then moves on to pragmatic approaches to teacher questioning in order to pave the way for a specific discussion and illustration of pragmatic study concerning teacher talk and teacher questioning. 1.1 communication theory 1.1.1 definition of conversational communication communication is a kind of social activity that needs more than two people to cooperate together (richards 2000:80). it is the exchange of ideas, information, etc. between two or more persons. in an act of communication there exists at least one speaker or sender, a message that is transmitted, and a person or more persons for whom this message is intended. there are many forms of communication, such as interpersonal communication, mass communication, cross-cultural communication. conversational communication is a kind of interpersonal communication with the purpose of conveying messages, and the function of message can be to warn, to advise, to inform, to persuade, to entertain and to express opinions, etc. communication is categorized into verbal communication and non-verbal communication with the verbal communication being the most important one. sentences are constructed with words according to acceptable grammatical rules. the eventual goal of communication is to make the sender of message understood by the receiver of message, namely, to understand what meaning the speaker intends to convey. therefore, only following grammatical rules and catching literal meaning of utterance is inadequate. the success of communication not only involves grammatical correctness, but also many other 6 factors, including participants, messages, encoding and decoding process and context. the two key factors encoding and decoding and context are presented as follows. 1.1.2 encoding and decoding in communication one relates his own thoughts with those of others by having language as a primary instrument. exchanging information, being the basic purpose of communication can be divided into two processes: the encoding process and the decoding process. the encoding process, being the first stage in the process of communication, may be defined as the process of translating an already conceived idea into a message appropriate for transmission to a receiver. this stage consists of three steps: creation of the message, adaptation of the message to the intended receiver and transmission of the message to the receiver. the encoding process is based upon senders perception of the way the receiver will perceive messages. the decoding process following the encoding process describes the receivers reflections when he or she obtains the transmitted message of the sender. this stage can be subdivided into four steps: attention, interpretation, evaluation and response. attention refers to either hearing or seeing the message, or both hearing or seeing it. interpretation means the act of the receiver in which he or she believes the sender meant by the message transmitted. it is generally expected that the receiver makes a conscious effort to interpret the message accurately. yet this does not always imply that an accurate interpretation will result, but only in most cases there is such an attempt on the part of the receiver. evaluation refers to the act that the receiver evaluates the message in terms of its meaning for himself when he has interpreted what he thinks the source meant by the message. response means the exact action that the receiver takes once the evaluation is completed. this response can be an overt response, an act of behavior, or a covert response. as a matter of fact, a response can be both overt and covert in many situations. communication is a developing and dynamic process, in which each participant will send a message and receive a message. in addition, the sender and the receiver always 7 change their respective roles, for communication is by no means a simple process of sending and receiving, but a complex process of encoding and decoding messages. in usual cases, when the speaker says something, the receiver will decode the message sent to him or her instead of receiving it passively. 1.1.3 context in communication context, in its narrow sense, is the setting where a sentence is located. evidently, this explanation is far from analyzing phenomenon in language use. lyons (1977) summarized six types of knowledge. based upon lyons summary, he zhaoxiong stated that a dynamic context is constituted by two categories: linguistic knowledge and the knowledge beyond linguistics. linguistic knowledge refers to linguistic competence and mastery of information mentioned above. the knowledge beyond linguistics consists of three parts: background knowledge; situational knowledge and mutual knowledge. background knowledge refers to common sense, the understanding of the world or encyclopedia knowledge, social norms of specific culture and conversational rules of specific culture. situational knowledge is the knowledge related to specific communicative situation, including communicative setting, time, topic, formality and mutual relationship of communicative participants. mutual knowledge means how much you know about each other. this part is of primary importance, for it is a key sign of difference compared with contexts in other senses. the mutual knowledge must be gained by two parties and each party knows well that both parties have a full understanding of mutual knowledge. this mutual knowledge is the basis of pragmatic inferring taking place between two participants. for instance, a said to b: he is a fine friend. both know who he is and what he has done to a, and a realizes that b knows what he has done to a. then a said to b the sentence above. b based upon the mutual knowledge inferred that he is a bad friend. from this example, it can be demonstrated that the intention of speaker can not be inferred without mutual knowledge mentioned above. 8 to sum up, we obtain the speakers intention not only by the words or syntactic structure but also by the contextual meaning in the conversation. context is a very important concept in communication. during the process of inferring the intention of speakers, context must be taken into consideration. the research focuses upon verbal communication. teacher questioning and students reaction constitute classroom communication. the aim of the study is to find out how teacher questioning promotes classroom communication. 1.2 speech act theory speech acts are simply things people do through language, for example, apologizing, instructing, agreeing a